Variables 8: Loose Ends
by Eelissuh
Summary: Anemone is once again possessed by the Coralian, changing her very physical appearance and sidetracking Holland's mysterious new plan.


Variables – Loose Ends

_Hmm this feels good we remember this with our husband how warm his skin is how alive…_

"Anemone!" _He is shaking us. There is sensation – pain – in our shoulders. They are frail and his hands are hard we feel confusion fear anger…love in those hurt, hurting hands. What feeling behind them! The kids at school used to do this to us we know these things but such fragile bones we have he must be careful not to break us._

"I'm calling Holland!" _Crackle static the click of their plastic fingers plastic spheres. These sheets are warm and damp. We hold them in our hands and feel bruises, what we call vessels of the red liquid life, breaking leaking spreading under white white white._

_There are more of them in the room now. We know them, the Cluster the host the minds we recognize The Sacrifice and a mother of one soon to be great, another King. His hands are large, hard, hurt too. _

"Anemone. You have to wake up," _the voice is stern, sharp, detached. _"Talho, call for Mischa!"

"W-why is does Miss Anemone look so strange?" _A child. There are many within us, children are prone to fear._

"Dominic, get the kids out of here!"

"She…she looks like Mama…"

"Out!" _Mama? We know the word: motherly, maternal, a pet name mumbled by our human children once uttered by our makeup in the early ages. Are we Mama?_

_There is another one now. One whose hands touched us, our host, with the one we know as Bear._

_ There…there is one other. We are familiar to him and he to us. He is not in the room but within us, our creation and as valued among our minds as the Thurston man. We raise our brows and stare within at him. I matters not what they are saying to us now, we are curious so curious how strange a part of us – not host or current body – who stands apart from us a we not at one with our whole._

"Why are we doing this?" he asks. _He is not we and yet we know him, made him. Has such time among the earthwalkers brought you so far from us? _"She, though, isn't yours. She was created by them and thus belongs to them. Return her and resume our studies elsewhere."

_She is our study now, we need to know what she is why she is, so similar to us to our Eureka how their singular minds attempt our creations with machines and prodding imperfect fingers. And yet look at what she, we, is and are: complete and curious beyond anything we encounter and understand. _

"Anemone cannot help what she is," he says.

_Her mind welcomed us. We were within her and we are one as should be, we must understand._

"Please let me go." _You wanted this. Our mind they called Gonzy leaves us to our progress. The voices in the room are loud now, are ears ring._

Dominic was a mess; desperately shaking the ghostly shell of an eerily grinning girl slumped against the wall. Gidget had removed the sheets, letting Holland lift the nearly weightless Anemone as she did so. Dominic had sat quietly on the floor at the foot of the bed, staring blankly at Anemone. His eyes never left her face, emotion devoid in his features and defeat weighing down his limbs.

"You can't do anything," Mischa had diagnosed, rising from the bedside and returning her medical equipment to its pouch. "There's nothing physically wrong with her, she just _isn't_ there." The room had fallen silent, a vacuum of noise save for the metallic hum resonating the air around the bed. Anemone's now-minty hair rose in tendrils of static, frizzing into a halo of wafting strands so like her namesake. Her mouth's dead smile cast a shadow on her lover's face. Dominic took the diagnosis silently, searching Anemone's face for the answers Mischa could not give him.

"_My_," Anemone had buzzed in the quiet after the door closed, "_what a fuss. We're only borrowing her_." The grinding of Dominic's teeth was painfully audible. He bolted upright, leapt onto the now bare bed and began violently shaking her.

"Give her back! Anemone! You have to wake up! _Please!_" His victim's head lolled limply, uncanny smile still splitting her pallid face. A thin rivulet of dark blood oozed from the corner of her twisted mouth.


End file.
